Tuesday, 31 July 2012

Mandraiv's Diary 2


We left the warehouse to discover an absolute shitstorm.  Apparently, the king had died and the city was in chaos.  There was extensive rioting, and in order not to tarnish my currently golden reputation with these new people, I agreed that we needed to get our captive to the guard, and not to join the looting.  We even managed to resolve a couple of issues on the way to the guard house, rescuing some noble named Armen Gelentro from a gang of commoners, running into some insane man who seemed fixated with the priest, as well as seeing the hellknights trying to restore order to the city.  Impressively efficient unit, the hellknights.

After we dropped off the gnome we figured our best course of action was to lay low for the night, as a curfew was in force and the hellknights weren’t really listening to reason before enforcing the associated penalties, as well as sable marines flying around putting down citizens seen on the streets.  So we headed back to the Varissian witch’s house to wait for the next day.  The witch appeared again, and thanked us, as well as telling us that her cards were magical, and that we should hang onto them.

Since the priest apparently caught something from the madman, we headed to the Bank of Abadar to pick up a little healing, both for the priest and for Artox, who was suffering some lingering effects from the previous day’s fighting.  We then headed for the heights to try to get a reward for finding the queen’s brooch, stopping off again along the way, this time at the church of Shelyn.  Turns out the gruff warrior with the ragged voice is a bit of a queer.

We eventually reached the heights and secured an audience with the queen, meeting her second in command along the way.  A fine looking pair of women, but still only women.  I guess the queen could be useful to me in my rise to power, but I can’t afford to be indebted to her in the process, and anything I gain from her can be as easily taken away.  Best bet was to play it cool, I guess, so I did.  But it was definitely worth collecting the influence and kudos I have coming to me for retrieving the brooch.

We were rewarded for returning the brooch, but then the queen volunteered us to help the city guard quell the riots.  Not impressed at all, but then again the queen owing me a favour can only be useful to my goals, so time to perform some civic duty and hopefully garner some a bit of a reputation with some of the city’s leaders.

Heading to the guard house, we met the captain of the city watch who asked us to grab a deserter from the watch by the name of Verik.  Apparently growing numbers of guards were deciding that their jobs weren’t much fun anymore, with the unrest in the city needing to be put down requiring a lot more work than their usual routines of, presumably, shaking down small business owners and beating petty criminals.  Verik was apparently at a butcher’s shop, with a bunch of other deserters, so we headed there immediately.

We entered through the back of the shop, once again our efforts at sneaking in ruined by some of the noisier members of the group.  I hope they learn some stealth at some point – if we’re going to continue hanging around together, we may at some point come up against opponents we need to get a tactical advantage over.  But then again, so far it’s not been a real issue.  We found ourselves up against Varik and a few other guardsmen, and soon had them all down, although surprisingly without any fatalities.  Even to the deserters.  Searching the building, we found evidence that they had been providing human meat to people, and we soon managed to establish that although Varik was pretty much unaware of any serious wrongdoing, his lackeys had been taking money to beat people up, then decided to upgrade to murdering and butchering them, and giving the meat to the people Varik was trying to help with free food.

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